What Are Flash Drives?

Flash drives, thumb drives, jump drives. All these different names mean the same thing! It used to be, long long ago (all the way back in the 80's, and yes, I'm being sarcastic) that if you needed to share information with another personal computer you could put it on a floppy disk. Then you could put it on a different kind of floppy disk; These ones weren't really floppy anymore, but they were very similar. Fast forward a little bit and you get to compact disks- CDs for short. Then came DVDs, and then finally, the flash drive.

These are usually about an inch to an inch and a half (about the size of a thumb, hence being called "thumb drives" sometimes). You stick the smaller metal end into the USB port on your computer. If you don't know if your computer has this port or where it is, look at all the holes in the machine, usually on the back, but sometimes on the side or front as well, and look for something that looks similar. It is extremely likely that you have a USB port on your computer as they've been standard for quite some time now.

Once you plug it into your computer, you'll be able to find it using the same technique you use to find files on your computer, and you'll be able to manipulate it in the same ways as well. Flash drives are like mini-hard drives in that they allow you to store files on them, manipulate files on them, and remove files from them as well. They are very handy when you need to share files that are too large to send in other means like email or cloud storage. For example, my husband recorded a video that was too large to send in either of those methods so he put it on the flash drive, brought it to his brother, plugged it into his computer, and then copied it over. The entire process (minus driving time of course) took less than two minutes.

Practical Tip of the Day:
When you go shopping for a flash drive, you'll find yourself overwhelmed with options. There are cheap ones, expensive ones, fancy and plain ones, large ones, small ones, etc. The most important factor in picking out a flash drive is how much storage it offers. If you noticed in the picture I placed above, the flash drive there says it has four gigs. (A "gig" is a unit of measure for computer data.) It is important to think about how much space you'll need before heading to a store. Will you be storing large video files or just transferring small word processing documents? Once you've picked the size, that will help narrow down your choices. Everything else is secondary. They make ones that connect to your keychain, ones that look like movie characters, ones that are as small as your thumb nail, and the list goes on and on!